Category: Rule of Law

More settlement happenings

Yves Smith:

If the Administration had really changed its stance on bank misdeeds, you’d see it putting the settlement on hold until the investigations led by Schneiderman had been concluded. The fact that they mortgage settlement is proceeding on schedule says this the Administration is, as before, trying to cover up its bank-favoring actions with better propaganda.

It’s really hard to disagree with this assessment of the state of play.

To make matters worse, Smith has another post looking at the scope of the settlement and the implications of a number of the specific questions Nevada AG Catherine Cortez Masto raised in relation to how broad or narrow the liability release that goes along with the settlement will be. Smith also points out that while the press is on to get California to join the deal (latest reports show CA was offered $15 billion out of the $25 billion package), other AGs don’t know how much money their state will get or how allocation of that money will be decided. In short, the push seems to be to get people to sign on to a deal that prevents states from prosecuting banks for robosigning, for forging mortgage assignments, for committing perjury and fraud, and doing so with zero guarantee that their state’s citizens will get financial relief from the settlement. Smith writes, “It is hard to fathom how any responsible attorney general can agree to this deal not knowing what they are getting for their constituents.” Agreed.

I’m by no means convinced that a deal will come in the immediate future. There appear to be too many outstanding questions for the outside AGs to get back in the fold. But then again, the promise of the Schneiderman task force may be enough to move people.

Nevada’s Attorney General is a bad ass

There has been a lot of attention paid – deservedly so – to the work of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden. They were two of the first AGs to voice objections to the federal government’s push with the state AGs fore a weak settlement deal around robosigning. So obviously they deserve a lot of credit for creating the conditions in which other AGs could step out – notably Nevada’s Cathernine Cortez Masto, Minnesota’s Lori Swanson, Kentucky’s Jack Conway, Massachusetts’ Martha Coakley, and California’s Kamala Harris.

But at this point in time, anyone speaking about the role of Justice Democrats would be remiss to fail to recognize how much Nevada’s Masto is kicking ass. Just check out her thirty-eight question letter to Iowa’s Tom Miller. Miller’s office has asked all state AGs to inform them by Friday as to whether or not they will be joining the federal settlement. Based on the list of questions Masto has turned in, and for the request for specificity and timeliness in the response, it seems pretty clear that Miller and the Feds are asking AGs to sign on to something without seeing a very specific term sheet for the settlement.

Abigail C. Field has a detailed run-through of Masto’s thirty-eight questions and they are very serious. Clearly Masto and her office is taking this entire process very seriously and is not interested in getting burned on a robosigning settlement. It’s heartening to see this level of effort and hopefully the net result is real accountability for the banks and real help to hurting homeowners.

Kuttner on Schneiderman and bank accountability

Robert Kuttner, in the course of a long post about the federal mortgage fraud task force and what it means to have New York AG Eric Schneiderman on it as a co-chair, includes a number of details about the fecundity of various avenues of investigation. Kuttner looks at the wide assortment of frauds associated with the inflation of the housing bubble and the ongoing foreclosure crisis and notes that real accountability would require a scale far greater than what we’ve seen so far from any law enforcement or regulatory body anywhere in the country. The scale of true accountability, Kuttner notes, could necessitate a total restructuring of the banking industry:

Bankers have escaped prosecution, and housing has stayed in a deep hole, in large part because of a disastrous decision that Geithner made in early 2009 — the policy of extend and pretend. Rather than cleaning out and breaking up big banks, Geithner claimed that “market confidence” required the Treasury to collude in the fiction that all was well. It was just a temporary problem of liquidity.

Propping up the banks and their balance sheets, in turn, precluded serious relief of the mortgage crisis, since a write-down of mortgage debt would require banks to acknowledge real losses.

In some ways, a successful prosecutorial initiative returns us to the debates of early 2009: if cleaning up the mortgage mess requires banks to take a big hit to their balance sheets, how then do we proceed with a restructuring of the banks?

Since markets have already acknowledged reality by driving down the value of the banks’ share prices, a settlement with much larger penalties, principal write downs, and even some prison sentences would actually be good for the banking industry because it would provide a fresh start with honest books. We could get beyond the “Japan” phase of this crisis, where the Fed has to keep pumping in trillions of dollars to disguise the real weakness of the economy and the banking industry.

It’s helpful that the Fed recognizes the perilous effect of the mortgage collapse on the recovery, since Fed intervention will be central to restructuring and recapitalizing the banking industry after the task force brings bankers to justice.

It’s good to see some honest assessment of what the full accountability pathway would mean for the larger banking system. There isn’t really a way to put bank executives in jail for criminal behavior, while also pursuing appropriately large civil damages, restitution for defrauded homeowners, and principle reduction to help borrowers now and not see the writing on the wall. Namely, that the big banks can’t afford to truly face up to the consequences of their action without being brought to bankruptcy and going through a restructuring process. This is a little discussed fact that undoubtedly has had some impact in the minds of political and financial elites in their thinking of what sort of accountability banks would be allowed to face.

If Kuttner is right and there can be accountability on the scale requisite by the extend of criminal behavior by banks, then the side effect of this will be that we can finally do what should have been done in late 2008 and early 2009 – rebuilding the banking system with stability, not can-kicking – in mind.

There are two core principles at play in the discussion of accountability for illegal behavior during the inflation of the housing bubble and in the ongoing foreclosure crisis. The first is that we must uphold the rule of law and no one should get away with breaking the law (let alone the centuries-old property law on which the entire economy is based) simply because they are a banker. The second is that the foreclosure crisis is producing a massive human cost which needs to be mitigated immediately. These two thrusts do not, in fact, contradict with each other. What Kuttner is identifying is the reality that the largest possible vehicles for aid to suffering and wronged homeowners is robust law enforcement and accountability measures. This is part of the reason why so many of us have pushed for there not to be any settlement of any matter which hasn’t been fully investigated. Investigation produces knowledge which informs law enforcement as to what appropriate punishment looks like.

It remains to be seen if this new subgroup that includes Schneiderman will pursue criminal investigations on the scale that Kuttner speculates (and which is clearly necessary). Hopefully good things will come from it. But I’d hope that in the course of these investigations, the consequences of really holding banks accountable do not deter law enforcement from doing just that. Instead, as Kuttner says, seize this opportunity to do what should have been done years ago and leverage this moment to rebuild the banking system in a way that stabilizes the economy and directly helps the American public.

A more optimistic take on the Schneiderman task force

Yesterday I was somewhat sour on the chances of the mortgage fraud task force that Eric Schneiderman will co-chair of succeeding in producing positive results. I think the reasons for caution remain, but David Dayen reports on a number of new facts which could make positive outcomes much more likely. In short, Dayen and his sources suggest that, first, Schneiderman’s entry into the task force was in no way dependent on his assent to a national settlement deal – he still opposes it. Second, Schneiderman’s role in the task force has been constructed to allow maximum flexibility for him to pursue what he thinks is the most fecund avenue for bank prosecutions – the fraud connected to the creation of residential mortgage backed securities (recall that it is securitization fraud which created the need to cover up such frauds through ongoing robosigning criminal behavior). Third, Dayen’s sources say if he can’t get prosecutions out of this task force, Schneiderman “walk away in the most showy, public manner possible, letting everyone know who was responsible for the lack of prosecutions.”

Other positive things worth noting include that Delaware AG Beau Biden remains committed to conducting his own prosecutions and remaining outside the settlement, while California AG Kamala Harris’s office reiterated her opposition to the current settlement as “inadequate.” While there were many positive statements from liberal groups yesterday, Color of Change and Russ Feingold’s Progressives United put out much more skeptical statements. And the New York Times published an editorial where they demanded a meaningful investigation that finally, at long last, held banks accountable for their behavior.

In short, the conditions for success may be better than they first looked, but people are going to be watching this task force closely to see if it actually produces prosecutions of banks and bank executives at a high level. This should be clear relatively quickly, given the voluminous evidence of bank fraud and other criminal behaviors. Hopefully we don’t have to wait long for this new initiative to produce results – and if they are not forthcoming, then we will know that our initial fears were realized.

Schneiderman joins a federal investigatory task force

I’d really like to be enthusiastic about the announcement of a new federal investigatory task force looking at the foreclosure crisis. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, much like Elizabeth Warren, has done enough to show his commitment to holding Wall Street accountable for their crimes to trust that his motives are good and his decisions should be trusted. Schneiderman was effectively the first statewide elected official to champion investigating foreclosure fraud, robosigning, and securities fraud in connection to the housing crisis. His leadership is largely responsible for forestalling any bad settlement. That credit means something in my eyes and so I am willing to trust that he and his staff truly believe that the resources and power that come from working on a federal task force will allow him to do even more to hold banksters accountable for breaking the law.

All that said, there are real questions about what bringing Schneiderman into the fold will actually do. Will there be quick indictments of senior level bankers? Or will the composition of the task force prevent Schneiderman from leveraging power in a constructive way? Abigail Field was the first to note how weak the composition is, identifying major problems with Schneiderman’s co-chair and beyond:

Schneiderman isn’t chairing anything. He’s Co-Chairing. That’s a huge difference. If he’s Chair he’s in charge. If he’s Co-Chair he needs consensus. And who is he Co-Chairing with? Four people, starting with Lanny Breuer. That’s unacceptable.

The reason we want Schneiderman in charge of prosecuting is because Breuer, who heads the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, hasn’t done his job. If he had pursued these prosecutions we’d have a lot more justice in this country right now than we do. Why has Breuer failed to go after the people who committed “misconduct and illegalities that contributed to both the financial collapse and the mortgage crisis”? Is it because he’s an ex- (and likely future) Covington & Burling partner? Doesn’t matter. His track record speaks for itself. There is only one reason to have him co-chair with Schneiderman, and that’s to rein Schneiderman in.

Schneiderman’s also got to contend with Robert Khuzami, the SEC’s top law enforcer. Khuzami’s SEC can be called aggressive only when measured against Breuer’s Criminal Division. Having Khuzami on the committee gives the weak-enforcement lawyers two people to Schneiderman’s one. And Khuzami is deeply conflicted because he was Deutsche Bank’s CDO lawyer in 2006 and 2007, peak shadiness times.

David Dayen points out another complication relating to another member of the task force, Tony West, assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Division: he’s the brother-in-law of California AG Kamala Harris. Harris is currently sitting on the outside of the bank settlement talks and is the subject to a full-court press by the Obama administration to get back on board. Given that West has no real experience with financial fraud, it’s hard to view his appointment to this task force as anything other than a cynical vehicle to put even greater pressure on Harris.

There’s a petition on Whitehouse.gov to get Breuer, Khuzami and West removed from the task force. For what it’s worth, if the administration wanted to strengthen their commitment to this investigation even more, they would replace those three with people like Nevada AG Catherine Cortez Masto, former SIGTARP Neil Barofsky, or even a prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald. These are people who, like Schneiderman, have shown real commitments to investigation and accountability in their jobs.

The whole point of raising these concerns is to help set the table to enable Schneiderman to succeed. If this committee ends up being a paper tiger, its creation will have served to disempower one of the few advocates for real investigations and accountability out there.

David Dayen raises another important and problematic consequence of the President putting Schneiderman on this task force:

More important, this announcement has collapsed the unified wall of objection on the left to a settlement. And I mean COLLAPSED. Just a day ago, activists were getting in the face of their AGs, warning them of the dangers of a weak settlement that provides little in the way of relief to homeowners. Now I have dozens of press releases in my inbox from liberal groups offering huzzahs to the President for this wonderful investigatory panel.

…

Only this isn’t a victory at all, at least not yet. Schneiderman may be trying to work from within, but he’s saddled with a panel full of co-chairs tied to banks with a history of obstructing accountability. The united front of Justice Democrats has been nicked. Kamala Harris, facing enormous pressure to go along with the settlement (she remains opposed at this point), now must contend with being the main big-state holdout AND having a family member co-chairing the investigation panel!

This is a classic Obama move, putting a threat or a rival inside the tent. It happened with Elizabeth Warren and David Petraeus and Jon Huntsman, and it’s happening again. It divides the coalition against a weak settlement, which will at the least shut down state and federal prosecutions on foreclosure fraud and servicing issues. It puts hopes in yet another investigation, one with little chance for success.

There is a real chance that Dayen is right. Of course, the best way to be proven wrong will be if this task force has teeth and starts producing indictments quickly. A good place to start, as Field notes, would be the 18 violations of the Servicemembers’ Civil Relief Act which JP Morgan Chase admitted to in congressional testimony – each violation representing a wrongful foreclosure of a service member. These are criminal misdemeanors with up to a year in jail per offense which have never been prosecuted. It’s a softball, but speedy indictments for these crimes would be a sign that the task force is going to, at long last, serious about investigating bankster criminality.

No bank settlement deal on housing for now

Originally posted at AMERICAblog

Yesterday I posted on the news of a pending settlement between the federal government, some state Attorneys General and the nation’s five largest banks around robosigning and other foreclosure fraud issues. The deal looked really bad and there was strong opposition coming not only from large progressive organizations, but a core of Justice Democrat AGs. HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Iowa AG Tom Miller, who’s lead the settlement talks, met yesterday in Chicago with Democratic AGs and their staffs, ostensibly (based on reports citing Donovan and Miller’s offices) to finalize a deal. Surprisingly, no deal was reached and Miller’s office put out a statement saying, “We have not yet reached an agreement with the nation’s five largest servicers, and we won’t reach a settlement any time this week.” This is a huge victory for the officials, citizens, and organizations who have been pushing to stop a bad deal from moving forward.

Not surprisingly, though, the New York Times is reporting today that a deal is “inching closer.” This despite the fact that yesterday’s meeting in Chicago was allegedly going to result in the approval of a finalized deal. The Times does look at some of the numbers in the deal and how much aide it would conceivably bring to underwater homeowners and to those people whose homes were fraudulently stolen from them by banks using false documentation. The second number, according to the Times, is $1,800 per stolen home, which isn’t much more than two months’ rent for most people as compensation for their entire house being stolen. David Dayen looks at the aid that underwater homeowners would get and notes:

I would add that underwater borrowers with a second lien, like a home equity line of credit, owe more like $84,000 on average. So this barely gets them back a quarter of their equity, and the second will probably remain untouched (because that’s on the bank’s books, usually, even though it’s worthless).

Given that the single largest predictor of foreclosure is if a home is underwater, aid which keeps a home substantially underwater is not aid at all. At best it’s kicking the can down the road. These realities are no doubt part of the reason that there hasn’t been a deal yet, no matter how badly the Obama administration and Tom Miller want their to be a deal. As a result, I doubt that the President will mention anything in connection to the bank settlement talks in tonight’s State of the Union address, though I find it hard to believe that there won’t be some mention of the foreclosure crisis and how the administration hopes to deal with it in 2012.

Failures of Justice

I know it’s gauche for progressives to care about silly things like the rule of law, transparency, and opposing torture or war crimes, but nonetheless it’s worth pointing out Glenn Greenwald’s look at three parallel cases which demonstrate the sad state of equal justice in America today. Greenwald puts side by side the case of the Obama Department of Justice’s prosecution of charges for an accused leak related to water boarding against CIA agent John Kiriakou, the dismissal of US citizen Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld for the torture he face while in US detention without habeas corpus rights, and the settlement of a punishment deal for a Marine sergeant who gave orders which lead to 24 Iraqi civilians to be killed in Haditha. Greenwald looks at these cases and notes:

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

It’s hard to disagree with Greenwald’s assessments of the state of play in American justice. It’s equally hard to not recognize that what Greenwald is describing is functionally identical under the Obama administration as it was under the Bush administration, excepting that Obama has been more aggressive in prosecuting whistleblowers than Bush ever was.

There is nothing that requires the Obama administration behave in this way. While his flip-flop from promising to filibuster FISA to voting in favor of its passage gave some indication that Obama was not trustworthy on civil liberties, Obama nonetheless campaigned on a platform which highlighted transparency and restoring the rule of law as landmarks of what his administration would look like. After all, we were often reminded, he was a constitutional law professor. The gap between what was promised and what we have received in these matters is sadly wide and does not look to be diminishing, but increasing.

Obama admin on verge of a horrible bank settlement deal

There’s lots of talk about the pending deal between what used to be 50 state Attorneys General and the nation’s five largest banks around what started out around robosigning, but seems to have expanded to broadly include foreclosure fraud and securities fraud. It looks like the Obama administration is on the verge of announcing a deal with some number of state AGs, a handful of regulatory bodies, and the nation’s five largest banks. There’s a meeting today between HUD officials and an undisclosed number of Democratic AGs or their staffs. Liberal groups are pushing to make this as strong as possible, with lots of activity from New Bottom Line, Color of Change, MoveOn, Rebuild, and many blogs who have been covering this crisis for years. The expectation is that the Obama administration wants to announce this deal in connection to Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

A couple pieces worth highlighting are by Simon Johnson at Politico and Van Jones and George Goehl of NPA at Huffington Post. Johnson makes a strong case against a quick, small settlement (that is, what we are now looking at), noting that “If there is a settlement after all the facts are known, the amount involved would likely be far greater than what is now on the table for robo-signing. Jones and Goehl likewise outline the principles for what a deal would have to do to actually be helpful to homeowners.

But if you’re wondering what the reported terms of the deal actually mean and if this is something which should be supported by Democrats or liberals or anyone else, I highly recommend you read Yves Smith’s post from this morning at Naked Capitalism. There are lots of reasons in my mind to oppose the deal as it’s been reported, but perhaps none greater than this:

The story did not outline terms, but previous leaks have indicated that the bulk of the supposed settlement would come not in actual monies paid by the banks (the cash portion has been rumored at under $5 billion) but in credits given for mortgage modifications for principal modifications. There are numerous reasons why that stinks. The biggest is that servicers will be able to count modifying first mortgages that were securitized toward the total. Since one of the cardinal rules of finance is to use other people’s money rather than your own, this provision virtually guarantees that investor-owned mortgages will be the ones to be restructured. Why is this a bad idea? The banks are NOT required to write down the second mortgages that they have on their books. This reverses the contractual hierarchy that junior lienholders take losses before senior lenders. So this deal amounts to a transfer from pension funds and other fixed income investors to the banks, at the Administration’s instigation. [Emphasis original]

I’ve yet to see an explanation of why transferring money from public workers’ and retirees to major banks is a good idea. There are other large, constitutional issues at play regarding how this deal mandates the breaking of contracts (which again is OK, it seems, as long as it is to benefit major banks), which Smith outlines in her post.

Unless and until the banks are forced to pay legal, economic, social and political costs in connection to their foreclosure fraud and securities fraud schemes, there’s no reason to expect them to treat homeowners an better and there’s no reason to expect that a similar crisis will not happen again in a few years’ time. Of course, a deal like this being driven by the Obama administration clearly belies the notion that there would be any meaningful federal investigation by law enforcement with an eye towards criminal prosecution. The only hope for criminal prosecution is with a handful of Justice Democrat AGs (Eric Schneiderman in New York, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, Beau Biden in Delaware, and Kamala Harris in California, to name a few). These investigations become even more critical in the face of a deal that would dramatically curtail the banksters civil liabilities. If you can’t change their behavior by forcing a huge cost for their crimes, putting executives in jail becomes even more important as a means of stopping this from happening again in the future.

One can only hope that AGs continue to balk at the deal being pushed by the Obama administration to forestall them from moving it forward. We should know in the next 36 hours whether or not this will happen as described.

De Boer on Paul

Freddie De Boer:

I could never vote for Ron Paul, for a thousand reasons. I have been arguing against many of his policies and the worldview that generated them for the entirety of my adult life. But I have to value his voice in the national debate because almost no other national political figures will raise these issues at all. I would love if these issues were being expressed by politicians and pundits who combined them with righteous views on domestic policy. But here, too, mainstream progressivism deserves a great deal of blame. Left wing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich have embraced discussion of foreign policy and civil liberties, and for their trouble they have been dismissed as unserious by the self-same progressives who now dismiss Ron Paul’s ideas. For far too long, mainstream progressives have signaled their “seriousness” precisely by denying the validity of people like Kucinich or Sanders, so taken with some bizarre definition of the reasonable that they effectively silence the leftist non-interventionists they say they want. If you want left wing criticism of our militarism and surveillance state, stop ridiculing those who express it.

The notion that there is something less disqualifying about support for murder and oppression than support for regressive and racist policies cannot stand scrutiny. The right to not be killed precedes all other rights. It is the foundation on which all other rights rest. What value can any rights have if they are not protected by a right to not be killed? Freedom of expression is no solace to a corpse. Likewise, what value do other rights have if those rights are not protected by rights of the accused? There is no value in freedom of assembly or religion if you can be thrown into a cage without a trial where you can invoke those rights. The right to protest has no meaning if the executive can respond to that protest by killing you without accountability, legal challenge, or review. Civil liberties are not merely right on principle. They are the necessary bedrock on which all conduct in a free society must rest.

I think this is right, though it’s worth noting that freedom to eat in restaurants regardless of race or freedom to make choices about one’s own body or freedom to marry whoever one is in love with are also questions of civil liberty. But yes, it’s hard to enjoy these liberties if you’re dead.

De Boer expands on the question of propriety of criticism, which I have looked at throughout this debate.

The whole argument has revealed American progressives at their absolute worst: incurious about the bad consequences of their positions; totally convinced that righteousness in intent can only lead to righteousness in effect; preemptively contemptuous of criticism from the left; dismissive of arguments that they themselves made under the last administration; and ultimately just as partisan as the conservatives they railed against three short years ago.

I want those who profess belief in liberalism and egalitarianism to recognize that they are failing those principles every time they ignore our conduct overseas, or ridicule those who criticize it. What I will settle for is an answer to the question: what would they have us do? If you can’t find it in you to accept our premises, at least consider what you would do if you did. For those of us who oppose our country’s destructive behavior, there is no place to turn that does not result in ridicule. Every conceivable political option has not only been denied by establishment progressives, but entirely dismissed. The idea that one should criticize the President from the left is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. The notion of primarying President Obama is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. The idea of supporting a candidate from a different party is not just wrong but self-evidently ridiculous. Every conceivable path forward, for those of us who demand change in our conduct overseas, is preemptively denied. I want my country to stop killing innocent people. What am I supposed to do?

This earnestness of this objection to the two party straightjacket that many progressives find themselves in is powerful. There are strong pressures from conservatives of both parties to make their ideas normative and marginalize actual liberal politicians. Sadly this is often adopted by ostensible liberals as well (as De Boer reminds us with reference to Sanders and Kucinich). In the eyes of political partisans, there is just no appropriate way for objections to be noted, outside of the Democratic Party’s own processes (excluding primaries) or private, off-the-record meetings with administration officials.

This is the heart of the tension within the American left today. I see it as very much tied to the duel problems of the Democratic Party being the sole instantiation for affecting progressive change and the failure of the Democratic Party and its leaders to map their ideological goals onto liberalism. In the absence of a political party which can stop us from killing innocent people, as De Boer asks, what options are there? What is appropriate? Or will the desire to confront these policies and the leaders who enact them meant to fail to find any outlet, as something which must be forced back into the closet where we can wear its shame in private? I don’t have a solution to the incuriousness of our citizenry, let alone of Democratic partisans. But I don’t see an alternative to continuing to raise these issues over the objections of pearl clutchers who want to silence criticism from the left.

Killing Iranian Scientists Is Terrorism

Like Atrios, I have no idea who is assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists. Odds are that it’s the US or Israel or both. But this is unquestionably terrorism.

Advocating for the murder of civilians, as Glenn Reynolds did in the Bush years and Rick Santorum is doing now is clearly sick. But actually perpetrating these attacks is criminal, whether it’s being done by the US, Israel, or some non-state agent.

I’m not so naive as to think extra-judicial means of affecting foreign policy is new to the US or any other government. We’ve been assassinating people we don’t like for years. As bad as doing this in the context of de-stabilizing leftist governments in Central and South America during the Cold War, doing it in an era where terrorism is routinely declared as the Greatest Evil Facing Americans is worse. We are trapped in our dishonest rhetoric, staring into a mirror but seeing nothing. Rank hypocrisy is a dangerous thing when it comes to war and peace. In the same way that we must oppose the torture of prisoners not only because it is wrong, but because it removes such protections for Americans when they are prisoners of war, we should not be assassinating civilians because it is both wrong and it would be much better if this wasn’t represented as an appropriate policy choice for other governments of the world when it comes to Americans!

I’ll make recourse to one more America-privileging argument before I close. One of the biggest challenges from progressives against the Bush administration was that policies like lying us into war in Iraq, killing countless civilians in Afghanistan, or kidnapping, torturing and detaining innocent people without due process were policies which make America and Americans less safe. The Bush administration’s persecution of a War on Terrorism made America less popular in the Muslim world, created terrorists with every misplaced bomb, and alienated us from our allies around the globe. In the same way, a policy of assassinating civilians in another country inherently makes America less safe, as it could make American civilians and government officials similar targets to assassination. Why would anyone support policies which, separate from any moral assessment, make us less safe?

Killing civilians is wrong. Always. This really isn’t hard, people.